Frank's submission

Cross by Langston Hughes

My old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I'm sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm going to die,
Being neither white nor black?

Myra's submission

Thighs -- CK Williams

The very great, very tall, truly out of human scale basketball player has been injured – "a deep thigh bruise" – and all his many fans including I admit me are worried: how can he play, as he puts it, at a hundred percent, when it hurts to walk, not to say leap: if he can't even leap, how can his team not suffer defeat?

I leave the sports page, return with reluctance to page one, and read – (I couldn't bear to before): a taxi driver in Afghanistan, a small man, five-two, arrested by mistake, hung by his wrists, and . . .
tortured: they don't want to say it, but tortured, by blows of his U.S. soldier-jailers' knees to his legs,

violent blows, countless deep bruising blows, hateful even to think it, for days, again and again, and his tormentors, instructed to do this, obeyed, because, they were given to think, this wasn't torture, torture is something with chains or flame: torture, they're told, "is something people like us don't do."

But then the obstinate taxi driver, who'd never confess he'd done anything wrong, because he hadn't, did, do something wrong, died, of blood clots risen to his heart from the crushed arteries in his thighs – his thighs, said the doctor who did his post-mortem, had been "pulpified," "pulpified!" like ground meat.

This week, with time to rest his injury, (a "Charley-horse," we called it when I played, it did hurt,) the very great player is feeling stronger: "I'm at eighty percent of my game," he reports to the press, and indeed his team wins, in a rout, I don't remember the score, but that's how the paper put it, "a rout."

C. K. Williams
Poetry Northwest
New Series
Volume 1, Number 1
Spring 2006

Gabe's submission for Monday, August 7

Attack by Siegfried Sassoon

AT dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!